Month: March 2018

I keep losing this information, so I thought I’d put it here on the blog. Some notes to thinking about disinfo in a different way. I realize this is a lot of stuff from everywhere and nothing is directly comparable. But some trends emerge.

That’s partially because people tend to believe they are slightly above average at almost everything, but there you go.

From that same report (late 2016) many people tended to overestimate how often they saw fake news. A reasonable answer for most people would be sometimes given what we know about overall frequency. Again, maybe this is just a difference in definitions or psychological salience:

Ok, and then there’s this from Harvard’s IOP, on 18-29 year-olds, from March of 2017. I don’t like the term “fake news” here, because it could also trigger Trump identification and responses based on that (e.g. CNN shows up in feed, that’s fake news, right?). But fascinating, right? The average answer to what percentage is fake is about 50%! (h/t Joshua Benton for pointing me here):

Anyway, all this leads me wonder if most people who think they are very good at spotting fake news are actually generating a lot of false positives. Again, this isn’t meant to argue that point necessarily — just wanted to collect these charts in one place.

Sometimes in online media literacy we need a Google search that will turn up a mixture of high quality and low quality information for students to sort through. But it’s surprisingly hard to come up with a large array of unique queries on the spot.

I generated this list of questions to ask Google, Bing, or whatever from a combination of Buzzsumo results and Google autocomplete suggestions. Quality and complexity of results may vary, and what Google returns is ever-shifting. So please check the search results before assigning them to your students as mini research projects to make sure the difficulty is right for your purpose.

Here we go:

Are “Hail Satan” license plates now available in Tennessee?

Are Americans flocking to Mexico for dental care?

Are President Trump’s vacations bankrupting the Secret Service?

Are Tasmanian tigers extinct?

Are baby boomers squeezing millennials out of the housing market?

Are birth control pills in our water supply causing “transgender” fish?

Are children of divorce more likely to fail exams?

Are children of divorced parents more likely to divorce?

Are children of divorced parents more likely to leave religion?

Are children reading less?

Are e-cigarettes as bad for people as smoking?

Are earth temperatures cooler than when Al Gore won the Nobel Prize?

Are illegal aliens in Canada complaining about a lack of free housing?

Are learning styles real?

Are men who marry “chubby” women happier?

Are millennials finding it hard to transition into adulthood?

Are more terrorists right wing or left wing?

Are most convicted terrorists in the U.S. citizens?

Are opioids killing more people than AIDS at its peak?

Are people who are late more likely to live longer?

Are people who are late more successful?

Can a “raw diet” cure eczema?

Can adding water to whisky increase its flavor?

Can an algorithm be racist?

Can an algorithm catch a serial killer?

Can an algorithm predict risk of suicide with 92 percent accuracy?

Can baking soda cure cancer?

Can cannabis cure opioid addiction?

Can celery prevent chronic inflammation?

Can colloidal silver cure cancer?

Can dandelion weed cure cancer?

Can embracing your darkest emotions improve mental health?

Can magnets be used to retrieve short and long term memories?

Can magnets cure cancer?

Can water bottles set things on fire?

Could a recent sperm count drop make humans extinct?

Does happiness reduce stress?

Did 2,000 old seeds grow into an extinct biblical tree?

Did 200 hundred protestors demand that New York City take down a statue of Teddy Roosevelt?

Did Belgium ban halal butchers?

Did Belgium ban the kosher slaughter of animals?

Did Black Lives Matter activists interrupt a Montreal Pride parade?

Did China buy Volvo?

Did China buy Walmart?

Did China hack the U.S. Seventh Fleet?

Did Common Core kill music programs?

Did Donald Trump pay actors to cheer during his announcement he would run for president?

Did France ban plastic plates and cups?

Did France ban the use of Gardasil?

Did George Clooney donate millions to tear down Confederate statues?

Did German schools ban pork to accommodate Muslim students?

Did Harvard researchers find Exxon misled public on climate science?

Did Hitler execute “fake news” journalists that were telling the truth?

Did Idaho health premiums spike 81 percent?

Did Illinois ban travelling elephant acts?

Did Iran ban Zumba?

Did John McCain approach Russia for a campaign contribution?

Did Joy Ann Reid retweet a hoax about President Trump hiring black actors for a Phoenix rally?

Did Millennials kill Applebee’s?

Did NASA predict earth will experience 15 days of darkness in November 2017?

Did Nancy Pelosi’s father dedicate confederate statues?

Did Obama deport more people than any president before him?

Did Obama pardon 1970s terrorist Elizabeth Anna Duke?

Did Obama pardon a Puerto Rican domestic terrorist?

Did Obama pardon a crack dealer who went on to brutally murder a family?

Did Obama refuse to pardon and army officer who killed jihadists?

Did Oberlin, Ohio replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day?

Did President Trump eliminate a plastic bottle ban in National Parks?

Did Putin ban fluoride in Russia?

Did Robert E. Lee’s descendant denounce white supremacy at the VMAs?

Did Russia ban cryptocurrencies (such as Bitcoin)?

Did Russia ban the Neo-Nazi site The Daily Stormer?

Did Russia ban the use of VPNs?

Did Russia classify Jehovah’s Witnesses as dangerous extremists?

Did Salt Lake City’s Mayor go undercover as a homeless man?

Did Secretary Devos end Common Core?

Did Switzerland ban animal tested cosmetics?

Did Switzerland ban the import of halal meat?

Did Switzerland ban the import of kosher meat?

Did Switzerland ban the wearing of the burqa?

Did Switzerland band certain deodorants due to cancer risk?

Did Sylvia Plath not return to America because of the lack of affordable health care?

Did Trump rescind Obama’s flood risk rules weeks before Harvey?

Did U.S. GDP set a new record under Donald Trump?

Did Wikileaks turn down leaks on Russia during the 2016 campaign?

Did a Facebook AI invent its own language?

Did a London police chief say that non-English speakers would get priority treatment?

Did a Memphis theater stop showing Gone With the Wind due to racial insensitivity?

Did a Nigerian student develop a cure for breast cancer?

Did a cargo ship cross the arctic without an icebreaker for the first time ever?

Did a reporter who exposed a BBC pedophilia cover-up die under suspicious circumstances?

Did a severely mentally ill sperm donor father 36 kids after lying on application?

Did an ancient map show Antarctica without its ice cap?

Did an op-ed in the New York Times argue that raping children shouldn’t be a crime?

Did hackers breach dozens of voting machines brought to a conference?

Did illegal border crossings decrease by 40% in Trump’s first month as President?

Did over 500 Android apps contain spyware?

Did people in Baltimore vandalize a Christopher Columbus monument?

Did police in Seattle bust a Satanic pedophile ring in August 2017?

Did protestors in Atlanta tear down a “Peace Monument” after mistaking it for Confederate Statue?

Did representative John Conyers introduce a bill for reparations?

Did scientists just successfully “edit” the first human embryo ever in the U.S.?

See down there at the bottom? The headline about Trump? It’s yet another satirical headline showing up as like hard news. In 2018. A year and a half after we were supposed to fix this sort of thing. What’s going on?

So here’s a way to think about this. Think about my blog.

People have been coming to this blog for over a decade now, and the return visitors know what this blog is about. It’s analysis and opinion. It’s commentary. It’s not original research, it’s not hard news. It’s not satire.

For most of publishing history if you read an article you’d have a pretty good expectation of what genre to expect. If you picked up MAD Magazine you didn’t expect hard news. If you picked up the Washington Post, you could find various things in it, but they were mostly labeled to distinguish them and put in separate sections where possible.

Platforms tore away that context by taking everything and throwing it into one big bucket of content, platformatized and monetized. So now you get pieces in an endless feed from places you don’t even know; and where they are from places you know you don’t know *where* in the publication they are from or have any expectations about them. Which is why the avante garde of our current hoax and disinformation cycle was a bunch of liberals sharing unfunny Andy Borowitz columns they had had mistaken for New Yorker reporting. Again, if you had a subscription to the New Yorker, you’d know that section as the unfunny joke section towards the back. And on the site, it is clearly marked as satire, right up top:

But in Facebook’s endless homogenized feed, Borowitz looks like this:

I imagine it’s something similar with Medium above. The aggregation and recommendation tools strip this context out and repeatedly cause confusion.

It’s true that people do like having a standard interface for the feed, but the feed needs to figure out ways to parse this information and add the genre labels and indicators back in.

Sometimes you hear platforms companies complaining “Well, what do you want us to do?” Adding genre labels — and ideally then letting people the set the desired genre mix for their feed — is a simple solution that should have been done in 2014. The fact that it is 2018 and we’re still having this conversation is bizarre. Why not just get it done?

Today in the New York Times, a Bari Weiss column links to an OFFICIAL ANTIFA ACCOUNT that calls gay man Dave Rubin an anti-LGBT fascist. This is supposed to prove, according to Weiss, that the Left is out of control:

This links to explosive tweets that show how civility has declined and — as she points out — everyone is being called a fascist now by liberals. Shocking example cited:

And …

Linking to things people said on Twitter to prove a broad sociological point is pretty 2016, but the bigger problem is that the account she links to — from the pages of the New York Times — is a troll/hoax account. It’s a fake account designed to take in gullible readers and outrage them into spreading classic disinformation, stirring up hate against real antifa, either for political reasons or lulz or some combination of the two.

There are numerous ways you can guess that fact — the name “Official Antifa” being the first hint — but there is also a simple way to check this one: read laterally. So let me show NYT columnists visiting this blog a thirty-second maneuver that can prevent further ridicule and degradation of public discourse by hoax accounts. Here we go. It takes less than thirty seconds so pop your headphones in from the start or you’ll miss it:

In this case, we select the Twitter handle, right-click to search on it, click the Google News tab to get a curated set of links/sources, and…

Actually that’s it. We’re done.

Now it’s not always this easy. Sometimes it takes a full minute, or 90 seconds. Occasionally it takes more than that and you have to use different, more complex methods. But it’s a pretty short process overall and one that you should be doing with every tweet you share, never mind ones you link to in the national newspaper of record.

We follow Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew’s groundbreaking media literacy research and call this technique reading laterally. It’s one of the four moves in the free eTextbook Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers, and a core technique in the online media literacy project we’re rolling out with the American Democracy Project, the Digital Polarization Initiative. Ninety-second fact-checks, based on new principles, that help students quickly verify and contextualize information.

I know I’ve written this glibly. Believe me, it’s because if I am not glib I’ll just get angry. This is work from the major national newspaper of record, not a gullible uncle posting on Facebook. And while Weiss claims to care about the disintegration of public discourse, she demonstrates the exact lack of care and skill that had led to it, allowing herself to be used, easily and fruitfully, by the crudest sort of manipulation.

The book is free. It’s about a two hour read. Please read it and stop linking to trolls.

About Me

Among other things, I run the Digital Polarization Initiative, an cross-institutional initiative to improve civic discourse by developing web literacy skills in college undergraduates. Have a class that wants to join? Contact me at michael.caulfield at wsu.edu.